Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
Democratic socialism is a much better move towards communism than an authoritarian approach. Therefor Europe is already more communist than China and Russia.
Mad, tankies?
murders 1 million Algerians in the 1960s because they want to be inependent from democratic France
Mad, tankies?
Except it doesn’t move towards communism. Social democrat system was pioneered in weimer republic and runs in EU since ww2. It’s compatible with political incentives so it stays stable
I know it doesn’t move towards communism, but it looks a hundred times more communist than Russia and China. Think away the money in socialist democratic countries and you can just work a 32-40 hour work week to receive housing, food, healthcare, social security, middle class luxury goods, etc. In socialist countries all of that is much more affordable with a normal job (and even during unemployment). It’s like resources are already equally shared but they just have a monetary backbone.
Russia is capitalist right now, as are social democracies. Either way, you’re missing 3 critical problems:
Social Democracies have private ownership as the principal aspect, not public ownership like in China. Both have private and public ownership, but private has power in social democracies and public in China.
The class character of the state in social democracies is capitlaist, while the class character of the state in China is proletarian.
Social democracies in the west depend on imperialism to subsidize their safety nets, China’s safety nets come from its own production and trade.
The nordics are not socialist in any capacity, nor are they nearer to it than existing socialist countries like China.
Lol no. I live in EU, you get no food, no housing except some extreme cases, no “middle class luxury goods”, social security is a scam that will never pay you back anywhere close to what you pay in into it now.
Healthcare is the only real thing of these. And you don’t get Healthcare if you don’t work or sign separate agreement and pay monthly “subscription”
TLDR you’re delusional.
You’re obviously focusing on the unemployed part of it. But even if I were unemployed I would get food and housing in my EU country. Although mostly it would be in the form of money with extras like access to a place to get free food or social housing.
With a normal job you can buy middle class luxury goods perfectly fine. Which is my point. Middle class luxury goods are stuff like TVs, game consoles, phones and decent clothes. Stuff like being able to go drink a night or go to the movies. All that stuff is perfectly possible which means you can get whatever “low paying” job and have a share of all of that. And without the idea of money that looks like economic communism already.
Yes that’s how capitalism works.
No, without money, economy would just instantly collapse. You wouldn’t have any of these goods.
I’m saying that most western socialist democracies, even with capitalism, look quite communist.
They do not.
Money is unnecessary in fully collectivized economies, hence why communism is described as moneyless.
And all of this at present relies on imperialism and neocolonialism, with a bourgeois state and private ownership as principal. It’s farther away from socialism than socialist countries.
Yes, I’m sure that European politicians just can’t wait to abolish the capitalist class. /s
Democratic socialism is just a tool to raise class consciousness, not the end goal itself. As soon as socialists have locked in 51% of the parliament, parliament will be dissolved by right wing forces and fascism will be organized to maintain existing class relations, as has happened in the Spanish Civil War, in the Finnish Civil War, in the '73 Chilean coup (with help from the CIA)
Europe isn’t socialist in the slightest, though, so I’m more confused than mad. Socialism is a form of society where public ownership is principal, and the state is run by the working classes. No country in Europe has this, nor the modern Russian Federation, they are all capitalist states where state authority lies in the capitalist class, while the PRC and former USSR do fit this.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about.
The form of democracy and the mode of production in China ensures that there is a connection between the people and the state. Policies like the mass line are in place to ensure this direct connection remains. This is why over 90% of the Chinese population supports the government, and why they have such strong perceptions around democracy:
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
How many workers european countries are exploiting from south asia and africa to fund their pension programme btw?